The present invention relates to network communication routing and, in particular, to a method and system of performing longest prefix matching for network address lookup using Bloom filters.
Longest Prefix Matching (LPM) techniques have received significant attention due to the fundamental role LPM plays in the performance of Internet routers. Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) has been widely adopted to prolong the life of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). This protocol requires Internet routers to search variable-length address prefixes in order to find the longest matching prefix of the network destination address of each product traveling through the router and retrieve the corresponding forwarding information. This computationally intensive task, commonly referred to as network address lookup, is often the performance bottleneck in high-performance Internet routers due to the number of off-chip memory accesses required per lookup.
Although significant advances have been made in systemic LPM techniques, most commercial router designers use Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) devices in order to keep pace with optical link speeds despite their larger size, cost, and power consumption relative to Static Random Access Memory (SRAM).
However, current TCAMs are less dense than SRAM, and have access times of 100 M random accesses per second, which are over 3.3 times slower than SRAMs (which are capable of performing 333,000,000 random accesses per second) due to the capacitive loading induced by their parallelism. Further, power consumption per bit of storage is four orders of magnitude higher than SRAM.
Techniques such as the Trie-based systems, Tree Bitmap, Multiway and Multicolumn Search, and Binary Search on Prefix Length techniques may make use of commodity SRAM and SDRAM devices. However, these techniques have not met the criteria to provide advantages in performance that are independent of IP address length or to provide improved scalability.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and system that overcome the problems noted above and others previously experienced.